Colour Science & Perception
what the eye settles, and what it cannot
Concept

Confusion point — where it appears

The chromaticity at which all of one class of dichromat's confusion lines meet. It is the direction the missing receptor would have responded along, so it is a measurement of people rather than a colour, and two of the three fall outside any printed diagram.

Named by 12 essays across 4 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Four different bases, one adaptation model, one number. The middle row of the basis built from the confusion points multiplied by 0.21, 1, 3.7 and 11 in turn, with the resulting adaptation residual drawn as a bar in each case. The four bars are the same height to 9e-16 of a ΔE00, because the row's scale cancels exactly between the gain and the inverse. Three of the nine numbers a colour match leaves free are invisible to an adaptation model, which is why the six the dichromat data supply determine it outright with nothing left to fit.

The three numbers a gain cannot see

Colour matching leaves nine numbers free. Three dichromat confusion points fix six of them and three choices of unit fix the rest — and it turns out that a von Kries gain is exactly blind to those last three. So the dichromat data do not merely constrain an adaptation basis. They determine it, with nothing left over to fit.

eye · Cones How cone-like a basis is, against how well it adapts. Each basis placed by how far its own implied deuteranope confusion point falls from the measured one (horizontal) and by how much an adapted observer is left with in it (vertical). The construction from the confusion points sits at zero on the horizontal by definition and near the top on the vertical. Nothing near the left of the picture is near the bottom: the closer a basis is to the receptors, the more a von Kries gain leaves behind. The unconstrained winner sits at 1.63 on the horizontal, further from the measurement than any published transform except CAT02 and Bradford.

The best axes are not receptors

If the axes that make a von Kries gain work were nearly the cone fundamentals, the published adaptation transforms would be cone-like and their departures would be slack in a fit. They are not. Minimise the residual over all nine free numbers and the winner sits further from the measured dichromat confusion points than any of them.

eye · Cones What a constraint costs is how far it pushes, in the directions that are seen. A scatter of every constraint imposed here on the nine free numbers. The horizontal axis is the length of the displacement from the optimum measured only in the six directions the objective can see; the vertical, on a logarithmic scale, is the excess cost that displacement actually carries. Requiring the basis to be the inverse of three realisable display primaries sits at the bottom left, at 0.068 and 0.022 ΔE00 — it removes three degrees of freedom and moves the answer almost nowhere. Requiring it to hit the three dichromat confusion points removes six and pushes 13 times as far, for 0.68. The vertical spread at similar horizontal positions is the part a count of parameters cannot predict.

A constraint is a direction and a distance

Four restrictions on the same nine numbers cost nothing, nothing, two per cent and seventy. How many parameters each removes predicts none of it. What does is the quadratic form evaluated along the displacement — and showing that it does means walking in towards the optimum rather than arguing at the edge, because at the edge the prediction is out by a factor of three.

limits · Limits A template that cannot place a point, fitted three ways. Three rows, one per set of stimuli the pigment template's cone matrix can be fitted over, each listing the three confusion points that matrix implies. The protanope's point wanders from (0.99, 0.20) to (0.76, 0.13) against a measured (0.75, 0.25), and the deuteranope's moves by 22.5 in chromaticity — further than the whole diagram is wide. A copunctal point is where two nearly parallel planes meet, so a template good to a few per cent, which is far more than enough to place a spectrum, is nowhere near enough to place this. It is why the population is built by moving the measured points rather than by deriving them.

A template cannot place a point

This collection's model of an eye is good to a few tenths of a per cent at predicting what a cone catches, which is far more than enough to place a spectrum. Asked where that eye's confusion points are, it puts the protanope's at (0.99, 0.20) against a measured (0.75, 0.25) and the deuteranope's anywhere from (1.1, −0.5) to (−18, 11) depending on which stimuli the fit was made over.

eye · Cones What the confusion points charge, across a population. A histogram of 200 members of a population of eyes, each scored by what the adaptation basis their own confusion points determine leaves after the gain. It runs from 1.22 to 2.24 ΔE00 with a median of 1.78. Vertical marks show the unconstrained floor at 0.97, the published transforms, and the single observer this site quotes at 1.65. The distribution straddles Hunt–Pointer–Estévez and reaches below CAT16: 18 per cent of members are better served by their own receptors than by a matrix built to make a gain behave, and 2 per cent than by the current recommendation.

The price is also the person

The receptor construction costs seventy per cent above the unconstrained floor, which is a number usually quoted as a property of the construction. Propagated across a population of eyes it runs from a quarter above the floor to a hundred and thirty per cent above it, and the population's own spread is wider than the entire gap between the published transforms the seventy per cent was being compared against.

limits · Limits How far a fitted transform is from anybody's eyes. Five groups of three bars: for each published adaptation transform, the distance from the population's own cloud to the confusion point that transform is committed to, measured in the population's standard deviations on that point. On the protanope's point every one of them is between 2.2 and 14.4 out, and on the deuteranope's between 3.7 and 11.8. On the tritanope's, 5 of the five are within three standard deviations — indistinguishable from a member of the population. The claim that these matrices are not cone responses is safe, and the evidence for it is two points out of three.

Two points out of three

Every published adaptation transform implies three dichromat confusion points, whether or not it was fitted to any. Measured in the population's own standard deviations they are two to fourteen out on the protanope's point and four to twelve on the deuteranope's — and between half a standard deviation and two and a half on the tritanope's, which is inside the population. The claim that these matrices are not cone responses is safe. The evidence for it is two points.

matching · Gamut Which width carries the answer, and which carries the doubt. Two columns of bars over the four things that differ between two pairs of eyes. On the left, the share of the population's disagreement each one accounts for — the attribution quoted here since the population was built, which puts the lens first at 81%. On the right, how much of the doubt each one puts on everything published here, which is its elasticity multiplied by how badly the width itself is known. The macular pigment comes first there, at 0.65 against the lens's 0.60 — a lead of 8%. The two lists agree exactly below the top.

Which measurement is worth making

Four things about an eye differ between people, and they have been ranked here by how much of the answers they carry since the population was built. Ranking them by how much doubt they carry gives a different order, and ranking them by which one takes a published claim closest to failing gives a third.

eye · Cones Room is not safety: two orderings of the same three claims. Three pairs of bars, one pair per published statement about the confusion points. The upper bar in each pair is the margin — how far the measured number is from the threshold that makes the statement true, as a ratio. The lower bar is the headroom — the factor by which one declared width of the population model would have to be wrong for the statement to fail. Both start at one, which is the line. Ordered by margin the three read the protan margin, the tritan margin, the deutan margin; ordered by headroom they read the protan margin, the deutan margin, the tritan margin, and the middle two change places. Every one of the three is inside a factor of two of failing, which the margins do not say.

What would have to be wrong

A great many statements here have thresholds written into them, which turns out to make an audit possible — for each one, the smallest change in a declared input that would stop it holding. Most are unreachable. One is inside a factor of one and a third.

limits · Limits A confusion point is about the pigments that remain. Three groups of three bars. Each group is one dichromat's confusion point; each bar is how far that point moves in chromaticity when one of the three cone pigments has its absorption peak shifted by eight nanometres. In every group the bar for the pigment that dichromat is missing has length zero — exactly zero, to machine precision, not merely small. The protanope's point does not move when the L pigment moves, the deuteranope's does not move when the M pigment moves, and the tritanope's does not move when the S pigment moves. The reason is algebraic rather than physiological: a confusion point is the direction that excites only the missing cone, which is the null space of the other two receptors' rows, and rescaling a row does not move where the other two are zero. So the point at which a protanope's confusion lines meet is not a fact about the pigment a protanope lacks, which is why the claim about it restates in nanometres of the M pigment.

A point about the pigments that remain

The chromaticity at which a protanope's confusion lines meet does not move at all when the long-wave pigment moves — not slightly, exactly not at all. It moves a great deal when the medium-wave pigment does. A dichromat's confusion point is a fact about the two receptors they have rather than about the one they lack.

eye · Cones The same claim in nanometres of pigment, where no declared width can reach it. Five horizontal bars on a scale of nanometres, one per published chromatic-adaptation transform, each showing how far the medium-wave cone pigment's absorption peak would have to move for the receptors' own protan confusion point to land where that transform puts it. Zero is the measured peak. The bars run from -10.5 to 18.2 nanometres — in both directions, so two of the transforms want the pigment shorter and two want it longer. Drawn across them is the 25 nm separation between the L and M pigment peaks, which is the whole basis of red-green vision and is not a number this collection declared. The nearest transform asks for a displacement of 30 per cent of that separation, and the span across the table is 28.7 nanometres — larger than the separation itself. No population, cloud or standard deviation appears anywhere in the statement.

The claim, in nanometres

For four rounds the claim here has been that every published adaptation transform puts the protanope's confusion point outside any real population of eyes, stated in standard deviations of a population whose widths were declared rather than measured. Restated as a pigment displacement it needs no population at all — and the nearest transform asks the medium-wave cone to move thirty per cent of the way to the long-wave one.

eye · Cones The same claim in nanometres of pigment, where no declared width can reach it. Five horizontal bars on a scale of nanometres, one per published chromatic-adaptation transform, each showing how far the medium-wave cone pigment's absorption peak would have to move for the receptors' own protan confusion point to land where that transform puts it. Zero is the measured peak. The bars run from -10.5 to 18.2 nanometres — in both directions, so two of the transforms want the pigment shorter and two want it longer. Drawn across them is the 25 nm separation between the L and M pigment peaks, which is the whole basis of red-green vision and is not a number this collection declared. The nearest transform asks for a displacement of 30 per cent of that separation, and the span across the table is 28.7 nanometres — larger than the separation itself. No population, cloud or standard deviation appears anywhere in the statement.

Five transforms and the space between them

Every appearance prediction here chooses one of five published adaptation transforms, and the five disagree about where a protanope's confusion lines meet by more than the distance between the two pigments the disagreement is about. That spread is itself a scale, and using it needs no population model at all.

brain · Appearance The secondary band, dialled from nothing to twice what Govardovskii published. Govardovskii's template has a second, smaller absorption band below 400 nm, published at 0.26 of the α-band's peak. It is the one coefficient in the whole template whose contribution is somewhere else in the spectrum than the peak, and it is the part of the template a reader is least likely to have heard of. Sweeping it from nothing to twice the published value moves the median observer's distance from the 1931 standard from 0.9354 to 0.9790 ΔE₀₀, monotonically upwards. That is a small effect — about a fiftieth of the residual — and its being monotone is the interesting part: there is no interior optimum, so nothing here recommends the published value over any other, and a coefficient whose measured value is not the one that best fits an unrelated agreement is a coefficient to leave where the measurement put it.

The band below four hundred

The pigment template every observer here is built from carries a second, smaller absorption band in the ultraviolet, published at 0.26 of the main one. Dialling it from nothing to twice that moves the median observer monotonically away from the standard one, with no interior optimum — which is what a physical constant looks like when nothing downstream is pulling it anywhere.

eye · Cones

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

BasisChromatic adaptationCone fundamentalsDichromacyIdentifiabilityCAT16Degrees of freedomMacular pigmentPigmentPopulationThe von Kries transformDeclared input

All concepts